The Trust Era: How Experience and Prediction Are Redefining Pharma’s Relationship With Patients
Patients are facing delayed diagnoses, fragmented care and rising financial pressure. Providers are managing burnout, resource constraints and increasingly complex reimbursement dynamics. Payers are absorbing volatility fueled by these same conditions.
These realities are pushing every stakeholder to reassess what “good” truly means—and to recognize how building trust has become foundational to the future of healthcare. The industry has important work ahead to restore confidence that the system can work for the people it is intended to serve.
Leaders at Syneos Health are championing approaches for pharma to redefine its relationships with patients by focusing on these building blocks of trust:
- Experience: improving the patient experience, removing the barriers that make care harder to access
- Transparency: strengthening operational reliability so teams can deliver with greater accuracy, consistency and confidence and provide patients with clear, trustworthy evidence to facilitate informed decision-making
- Relevance: applying foresight to communication, using data-driven insight to meet people where they are heading, not just where they have been
Together, these building blocks point to a single imperative: rebuilding trust not through promises, but through how the industry shows up for people every day.
Pharma’s Next Imperative: Restoring Trust Through Access and Experience
Kim Plesnarski, Vice President of Strategic Patient Services, points to the structural cracks widening across healthcare. Provider burnout, administrative overload, appointment delays and reimbursement hurdles are changing what healthcare services patients can realistically expect to access. A recent poll from AnswerSuite reveals that nearly three-quarters of healthcare providers now avoid products with complex authorization steps.
These fractures create intense frustration for patients and providers, contribute to delayed or disrupted care, worsen outcomes, and ultimately erode trust in a system that is already strained.
Plesnarski predicts that by the end of 2026, pharma will assume the role of healthcare-as-a-service partner, stepping into gaps that sit between diagnosis, access and adherence. This emerging model could include:
- Streamlined access support that reduces prior authorization complexity and shortens time to therapy
- Navigation services that help patients move from diagnosis to specialty care more quickly
- Adherence and persistence programs tailored to individual barriers, not one-size-fits-all reminders
- Data-enabled, behavioral insights that flag when patients are at risk of dropping out of therapy, so support can intervene
- Provider-facing workflow simplification, reducing admin burden and making difficult treatments easier to prescribe and manage
“While it seems bold today that pharma can play an active role in enabling the full care experience, this will quickly become expected,” Plesnarksi says. “Patients, providers and policymakers will demand it.”
As this shift accelerates, pharma’s role becomes less about supporting a prescription and more about supporting the patient. Companies that help reduce administrative barriers, shorten time to therapy, guide patients through complex steps and lighten provider workload will strengthen trust by making the system more navigable and responsive. Trust can grow as the experience improves—when people feel the path to care is clearer, faster and less overwhelming.
Trust Through AI That Supports, Not Replaces, Human Judgment
To the degree that trust in healthcare depends on consistency, AI is poised to become one of its most important stabilizers. Stephen Hoelper, MS, MBA, Vice President of Commercial Technology Solutions, describes a near future in which AI systems serve as deeply embedded partners across development and commercialization—not replacing human expertise, but amplifying it.
“By 2026, AI agents will become the invisible operating system of pharma—autonomous, interconnected and deeply embedded in every business process from R&D strategy to global supply chain optimization,” Hoepler says. “These agents won’t just assist; they will collaborate, learn and orchestrate entire workflows, enabling companies to operate at a level of speed and precision unimaginable today.”
AI will strengthen the reliability and transparency of the decisions humans make, helping teams track milestones, anticipate risk, ensure data accuracy and maintain consistency across complex programs—capabilities that support clearer communication and more confident planning.
Using Foresight to Build More Human, Trust-Driven Engagement
A significant shift in trust-building will likely come from how pharma communicates. Jeanine O’Kane, President of Syneos Health Communications, notes that engagement is moving beyond retrospective insight gathering and toward foresight-driven models—ones that anticipate evolving attitudes before they fully materialize in behavior.
Historically, most engagement strategies relied on past behavior among broad, static segments. Today, richer signals and AI-enabled analysis allow teams to identify early indicators of changing needs and respond with greater relevance.
“Prediction wasn’t impossible—it just wasn’t practical,” O’Kane says. “Now we can see the early indicators of where people are heading and communicate in ways that meet them there.”
When interactions feel timely, relevant and personal, people feel understood rather than targeted, a distinction that has become central to trust as attention grows more difficult to earn.
Patient-Ready RWE: Trust Through Radical Transparency
Ashley Brenton, PhD, Vice President of Real World Evidence (RWE) and Late Phase, highlights a transformation that may have the most direct impact on patient empowerment and trust: the shift from RWE as an analytical artifact to RWE as a patient-facing insight.
Today, RWE datasets are massive, complex and often inaccessible to non-experts. Brenton predicts that in 2026, AI will help translate this complexity into plain-language summaries that show how a treatment performs among people who share specific characteristics with an individual patient versus broader study populations.
AI is already rapidly analyzing billions of data points across age, comorbidities, prior treatments, biomarkers, dosing patterns and adherence behaviors, then surfacing patterns that matter for a particular subgroup. It will be a major development when AI can use this real-world data to generate clear, personalized summaries that support real shared decision-making between patients and providers.
“For industry, patient-friendly RWE is becoming a powerful differentiator. It improves transparency, supports value conversations and aligns evidence generation with real-world needs.”
Ashley Brenton, PhD | Vice President, RWE and Late Phase
The Common Thread: Trust Through Anticipation
Across all four perspectives, a clear throughline emerges: Pharma’s next era will be defined by its ability to anticipate what patients, providers and healthcare systems need before they ask for it. Together, these predictions point to a more interconnected, intelligence-driven industry—one where trust is not assumed, but built with experience, transparency and relevance.
Leaders who aspire to rebuild trust and loyalty will focus on the core building blocks that shape how people interact with the system:
- Reducing administrative and emotional friction for patients and providers
- Integrating AI responsibly to reinforce—not erode—credibility
- Creating communication models that adapt as people’s needs evolve
- Aligning evidence generation with the lived experience of care
In 2026, these building blocks of trust will define performance, competitiveness and the future of patient engagement; and the organizations that strengthen them with intention will set the pace for the industry’s next era.
Contributors
Ashley Brenton, PhD, Vice President, Real World Evidence and Late Phase
Stephen Hoelper, MBA, Vice President, Commercial Technology Solutions
Jeanine O’Kane, President, Syneos Health Communications
Kim Plesnarski, Vice President, Strategic Marketing Services
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